How Video Games Changed the World (2013) Movie Script

1 Videogames, for years the domain of outsiders and geeks, and people who look a bit like owls. Somewhere down the line, gaming went mainstream and now everyone plays them 18 hours a day, even George Alagiah. And while that is a lie, games have infiltrated popular culture and fundamentally changed the way we interact with the world. Yes, really. Now, tonight, I'll share my personal, possibly bull-headed selection of the 25 most significant games that ever there were, and we'll be hearing from videogame insiders, videogame likers, and some reassuring, friendly, familiar faces so easily spooked viewers don't shit their own kidneys out with terrified indignation. We'll show you games that broke out of the pixelated ghetto and romped across mainstream culture. We'll see games that will make you feel guilty, or make you cry, or even introduced you to your soulmate. In fact, we'll show you nothing less than how videogames changed the world... because that is the title, so we have to. Today, in 2013, games are almost as commonplace as shoes. Practically everyone plays them in some form. Even bacon replicant David Cameron was reportedly addicted to the jolly food slash 'em up Fruit Ninja on the iPad. But games weren't always as graphically staggering, painstakingly realistic, or conceptually sophisticated as they tend to be today. No, they had to start somewhere. Gaming's Big Bang happened in 1972 with the release of a simple looking tennis simulator, a game called Pong. Pong, of course, was very simple. You know, it begins with a black screen, as all great moments do. It's meant to be kind of table tennis but it was like a moving white bar that would go up and down, and you could bounce a ball from side to side. But it was so limited, so kind of basic in its function, and yet, curiously, satisfying. Pong wasn't the first videogame but it was the first truly successful one, and it contains much of the same basic DNA as almost every game that followed. It was co-created by Atari founder Nolan Bushnell and programmer Allan Alcorn. Without these two legendary figures, there would be no videogames industry at all. I had completed the design and we said, "Well, it plays pretty good, "let's put it in a box and see if anybody plays it." And all it had was the name Pong on it. There's no instructions, there's just a coinmach. And Nolan and I carried it over to Andy Capp's Tavern, put it on a barrel, and within a short time, within a week or so, the thing stopped working, and so I went over to fix it... That became full of quarters. Yeah, I opened it up and the quarters just gushed out, filled my pockets with quarters and came in the next day and said, "Nolan, I think we've got... Something is going on here." And you go, "Hmm." Pong was incredibly simple. Everybody knows how to play ping-pong. It was a very stylised version of ping-pong on a TV. The controls were simple, just a knob each to move the paddle. There was also hidden depth. The power allowed the ball to come off the bats in different angles, depending on where you hit it, so it introduced this whole idea of skill and strategy, which is really, really important. Yes, it's hard to remember now, but in 1972 this was cutting edge. You know, I found the graphics on Pong, the little players, the little lines, they moved quite smoothly, it was quite impressive, and the ball moved smoothly. By ball, I mean square! We didn't make the ball square because we thought that a square ball was cool. It's the only way we could do it, and so, you know, in some ways, I'd say the first 10 years of the video game business, we were always bumping right up against the edge of the technology that was allowed to us. 'You are watching the most exciting game 'you'll ever see on your TV set.' Technology may have held the graphics, back but soon, the rise of cheap microchips created a wave of Pong-like imitators you could plug in and enjoy in your living room, revolutionising home entertainment at a stroke. 'Oops, a goal.' Until Pong came along, you would have to sit there and withstand whatever the TV threw at you, which in the '70s was only a handful of channels. It often meant a choice between a documentary about bricks or Jimmy Savile. Now, suddenly, there was a box you could plug directly into your TV and take control. At the time, the very idea of that was mind-manglingly exciting. That was the revelation, the fact that you didn't feel passive for the first time. Not that you don't mind being passive with TV, but for the first time you were doing something here that translated into something over there and that was kind of mind-blowing. So I think it was just the miracle of being in the TV and operating something from your couch which was the game changer for me. I can remember gathering around it with my whole family, it was like the piano in the 1940s or the Victorian era. We all gathered around and were amazed at this idea of interacting with the television screen. Even though the graphics were profoundly simple, there was that sense that this was a whole new thing that was happening. Trad TV was clearly so rattled by the obvious threat posed by the technological upstart, it made desperate attempts to incorporate the new enemy into its flagship entertainment shows. When Pong came out they tried to use it as part of a live TV thing, and I know I am not imagining this, with Bruce Forsyth. - Nice to see you to see you... - Nice! Well, what else could I say? Bruce Forsyth had jumped ship from BBC to ITV for a huge pay packet, there was a huge story about that, and ITV gave him the whole of Saturday night. And the competition they had, they had people using a voice-operated form of Pong. I know I've seen this. You're looking at me like I'm hallucinating, but I have seen this. Ladies and gentlemen, tele-tennis. And even as a kid I was thinking, "Wow, this really doesn't work." In the years following Pong, amusement arcades filled with coin guzzling monoliths became a common sight, but in 1978, the success of one title catapulted gaming out of the dark and further into the mainstream. This stark, bleak, humans vs aliens fight-to-the-death quickly hoovered up coins worldwide. What Space Invaders did was it took arcade machines out of those arcades, out of bars and suddenly, they were in restaurants and cafes, places where families could go. I think it was the first game that really did that. It took games into the mainstream. I can remember the first time I saw Space Invaders. It was at the Silver Blades ice rink in Birmingham. We were on a school trip, on Thursday night, and I remember seeing this game and putting 10p in the slot and it was like a revelation to me, it was the most amazing experience. And from then on in, Space Invaders was my life. You would get 40p dinner money each day and you could go down to the cafe down the hill and get beans on toast for 20p and have two games of Space Invaders. The pace of Space Invaders was beautiful. As a newb, who had never played, you know, an arcade game before, you could walk up, put 10p in, and you could play for, like, five or ten minutes without being annihilated. And that pace meant that it drew people in. It also satisfied something which gamers seem to enjoy - attrition, cleaning something up. You have this block of stuff which had to be cleared away. It's odd, because it is something you can never win. You clear them up, there's a little pause and they all come back again. But somehow, you want to keep on doing it. Mastering Space Invaders became an overriding obsession for many. This is one of the first published books by revered author Martin Amis. It's Invasion Of The Space Invaders. A surprisingly in-depth collection of his arcade tips with a foreword by Steven Spielberg. Martin Amis has since disavowed his involvement in the Space Invaders tips scene. And the game's appeal wasn't simply restricted to the nature of its challenge. The sheer experience was equally important. This was the first game to evoke a distinct mood and tone. The music sped up as soon as aliens got closer to you, and it was like that excitement and that, "Oh, this is really responding to what I am doing." It's like a heartbeat when the Space Invaders are coming down the screen. It's, "Dum, dum, dum, dum." It accentuates your own tension, it was perfect. It was very stylistic. You know, the shape of the alien, as soon as you saw it, you kind of understood it and it burnt it into your mind. As a result, Space Invaders wasn't just an arcade hit, but a bona fide, mainstream, cultural phenomenon. Yes, tonight, we will be discovering just who the Space Invader champion of the Midlands is! Space Invaders tournaments were considered entertaining enough to be televised, for God's sake! 'And how Tim Coxon of Stoke must be feeling now.' And the world of cheerful children's animation also couldn't resist the pull of the global fad of the moment. Left a bit, steady. Right. Right a bit, fire. Every element of the Invaders template had such an instant iconic purity, it still resonates today, with references to it popping up everywhere. Slick TV commercials nod in its direction and it appears on walls around the world, courtesy of street artist Invader. And Space Invaders still survives as a game, albeit in a remixed, re-imagined, modern form. I was very honoured to be asked to do it. Working on Space Invaders is like being asked to go on stage and play with Dave Gilmour out of Pink Floyd or something like that. Space Invaders was the catalyst for an explosion of similarly themed games in the late '70s and early '80s as pubs, arcades and cafes rang to the sound of zipping lasers and white noise explosions. The primitive graphics of the day were ideally suited for depicting basic shapes competing for power in black space, but with this incessant focus on interstellar combat, games were in danger of becoming a chiefly male obsession. To gain wide acceptance once again, games would need to become less abstract. What they needed was some kind of likeable character. Pac-Man was arguably videogaming's first mascot. He is sort of the first character, I guess, you know, the very, very iconic character of videogames. The designer of Pac-Man, he introduced this Japanese concept of kawaii, which is cute. Lots of Japanese design is based around this sense of kawaii, cuteness. And so, not only is Pac-Man very kawaii, very cute, but also, so are the ghosts. He did this because he wanted to appeal to young girls and women as well as men, and in fact, he said in interviews since then, which sounds sexist now, but he's thinking, "How can I make it appeal to women?" "Oh, I know, women like food." So... Famously, he'd seen images of a pizza with a slice taken out and he saw Pac-Man in that image. And Pac-Man does have a lot of character. I think the reason why everything went Pac-Man crazy for a while was because he had a face. Even the ghosts, even the enemies had character, and they had names. Inky, Blinky, Pinky and Clyde. They all had very distinct personalities and they did their own thing in the maze. Pac-Man's rudimentary artificial intelligence also represented a breakthrough, tricking the player into thinking the ghosts were actually alive with their own personal traits. Blinky, the red ghost, was a fast, aggressive hunter. Inky, the blue one, was a dawdler. Pinky would anticipate where you were going and try and block you off, while Clyde, the orange one, was programmed to rapidly chase you until he got too close, at which point he'd dart back into a corner. This hidden layer of sophistication made the ghosts seem less like computerised drones and more like fallible, living characters. But the Pac-Man ghosts, I really liked. And the cherry, the idea of a floating cherry was cool. And the fact that it changed when it ate. I mean, all these things were kind of major steps forward. This was the grammar of gaming being constructed before your eyes. It was the first time people thought, "Well, why not do this?" It was the first videogame to actually feature cut scenes as well. There were little humorous cut scenes with Pac-Man and the ghosts before each level. You had Pac-Man being pursued by ghosts and then Pac-Man getting a giant. He would turn around and chase the ghost off the other way. And one of the ghosts would get his little rope caught and he would come out and see his pink leg stuck, sticking out from underneath. It introduced the gentle element of humour to game play which I think helped broaden its appeal. Likeable characters are big business and Pac-Man was no exception. Pac-Man, instantly after it came out, it was so enormously popular. We started seeing Pac-Man T-shirts, Pac-Man lunchboxes, there was a Pac-Man cartoon. Pac-Man soon became a staple of the cheesy American Saturday morning cartoon slot, winning his own goofy series as well as some irritating commercials. # Now Pac-Man isn't just a game you play # It's a crispy corn cereal that's coming your way. # Chomp, chomp, delicious! For a time, no quintessentially '80s commercial was complete without a whorish cameo from the circular pill freak. # 7-Up cools your thirst. # Pac-Man was on stuff. There was a Pac-Man board game as well. It was a terrible board game with a big plastic Pac-Man that would go about, gobbling up pellets and stuff. And even there was the weird knock-off stuff as well. Like, how do you badly draw a Pac-Man? You know what I mean? But a badly drawn Pac-Man. That's an impressive thing when you see some merchandise, and you go, "That Pac-Man doesn't even LOOK like Pac-Man." That's when you know something has caught on in a big way. In the wake of Pac-Man's success, games began to resemble living cartoons - bright, cheerful worlds, packed with non-threatening characters. A golden age entertainingly celebrated earlier this year in Pixar's charmingly evocative film, Wreck-It Ralph. My name is Wreck-It Ralph. Ralph, you are bad guy, but this does not mean you are bad guy. I don't want to be the bad guy any more. So far, so twee, but that was about to change. The USA and Japan had ruled gaming's roost but now the British were coming and we weren't interested in some cute, yellow bauble, running around a maze, gobbling dots. We were bringing something else with us. We were bringing anarchy. The early 1980s were a heady mix of the Iron Lady's iron fist, soaring unemployment, Charles and Di's sexless kissing and this footage of the Rubik's cube that has to be included in every '80s nostalgia montage by law. All of which provided the backdrop to a major revolution in British homes as the computerised future arrived. Now, it doesn't look very futuristic looking at it now from the vantage point of the future, but it did back then. THAT'S how time works. The explosion of home computing that happened in the '80s was almost unique to Britain... because of Clive Sinclair. In 1982, Sir Clive Sinclair launched the ZX Spectrum, a cut-price home computer intended to automate staid, and some might say piss-dull tasks, like spreadsheets and home economics. But more excitingly, as far as Britain's school kids were concerned, the Spectrum could play games, often rudimentary clones of existing arcade hits, but games nonetheless, and for a fraction of the price of the swanky American cartridge systems. And, crucially, the Spectrum wasn't a closed system. You could write your own programmes for it, your own games. And if you didn't know how, there were hundreds of available blueprints to learn from, printed line by line in the back of hobbyist magazines, like this. I would come home and see my brother playing with his computer and learning to code it, using a language called BASIC. What was it? You'd write, "10 say fuck, "20 goto 10". And it would go, "Fuck, Fuck, Fuck..." That was my coding. That's my coding career. It spawned sort of a huge explosion in creativity, where some brilliant people were coding in their bedrooms. It was just like the punk movement. The punk movement was very much like a DIY ethic. It was like, "If you can't play guitar, fuck it, "pick up a guitar and play it. "It doesn't matter if you can't do it. Do it." And that is what games were like in the early '80s. It was like, "Don't know anything about programming? It doesn't matter. Try it, learn, do it, release it." If you ask me, the ZX Spectrum was the people's computer, a true British original. It didn't have the fastest processor, its graphics were primitive and the keyboard was this notoriously awful dead flesh rubber catastrophe. But it did have an immense range of bizarre and imaginative games, shot through with a uniquely British sense of humour. Many were almost like playable sitcoms or comedy sketches. There were hundreds of colourful, quirky Spectrum games, but only one came to truly symbolise the era. I mean, the first thing that you are struck with with Manic Miner, is the hideous tune at the beginning. It's a sort of aural assault. It's disgusting. And the colours as well - so garish. But there was something, there was something really kind of charming and mysterious about it. What's fascinating to me now about Manic Miner is just the excitement of the rooms and how many rooms there were. You know, all you were doing was looking at something that, I don't know, had a few different blocks flying around. But there was something really thrilling about it. What made this landmark game all the more unusual was that it was written in just six weeks by a 17-year-old called Matthew Smith. Every single Spectrum owner in Britain had that game, that's how good it was. It's absolutely chock full of humour. The game is very much Matthew Smith. The guy's a legend and rightly so, and Manic Miner is his signature. Manic Miner makes it onto our list for being the quintessential Spectrum game - an idiosyncratic, peculiarly British home brew classic, still celebrated today in clever, fan-created homages on the internet. The Spectrum's chief rival was the all-American Commodore 64, a more powerful and altogether more confident system, marketed with the emphasis on fun in impossibly wonderful advertisements. # Are you keeping up with the Commodore? # Because the Commodore is keeping up with you... # Commodore games had slicker graphics and far superior sound. And as well as its slew of American imports, it still had room for oddball British titles. One of the games I remember most fondly and that I'm most pleased to have been involved with was my old game Hover Bovver. Primarily because that was a collaboration in design with me and my dad. It's another one of these silly, British comedy games that just arose one morning when we were sitting in a place where there was somebody mowing a lawn outside. We just started tossing back and forth this idea of a comedic game where somebody was mowing a lawn and there could be a dog which gets in the way. I mean, it was all very Terry and June, you know? But... it ended up being a really fun little game. But it wasn't all rosy in the British gaming garden. It wasn't like a club, no. Commodore and Spectrum owners didn't like each other, at all. Long before Blur versus Oasis, or any other of those hideous media inventions of fake clashes, the Commodore versus Spectrum debate was a civil war, a geek civil war, whose repercussions can still be felt to this day. The Spectrum was British, you know, it was kind of the local favourite and all that. But... you always knew, tell me, you always knew, didn't you, you always knew that you had the lesser machine. Essentially, you would be driving your Triumph, and that's great. And then we'd pull up in a Cadillac, which essentially, the Commodore 64 was, with its big, clacky keys. Shift, run, stop, loads and plays. Still, despite their rivalry, Spectrum and Commodore owners could unite on one key issue, and that was that owners of the third system - the BBC Micro - very much the Liberal Democrats of the computer world, THEY were dicks. The BBC Micro was a chunky, middle-class computer created for the BBC's Computer Literacy Project - a jolly, well-meaning attempt to get Britain coding, courtesy of jolly, well-meaning, but not notably sexy edutainment shows like Making the Most of the Micro. I've got here a listing of the programme that I have taken off the printer. And it's a reasonably sized programme for a microcomputer. Little wonder the computer itself had a bit of an image problem. The BBC was for people who were a bit posh, because that was quite an expensive machine. So if you were BBC, you were a bit posh. I was a BBC Micro guy. The squidgy keyboard Spectrum... I mean, I just laughed at it! Square it may well have been, but the BBC was soon blessed with a killer app of its own - a game that didn't just promise you the world, but handed you an entire universe, then let you do with you wanted in it. A game called Elite. These spartan, monochrome wire-frame graphics, primitive by today's standards, were stunning at the time. But that was only the start of it. Elite came out in 1984, and it was really a ground-breaking game on so many levels. It was impossibly big. You know, what Elite did was it simulated the entire universe. It didn't do anything by halves. Elite was made by two incredibly intelligent university students called Ian Bell and David Braburn. And technologically it was a massive, massive achievement, because you have got these enormous galaxies into 32K, which you couldn't even open a Word document without now. That game feels like it fell through a time hole from 20 years in the future, it shouldn't have existed back then. Both technologically and also in terms of what they were trying to achieve in creating a living, 3D world. Elite wasn't just a technical marvel, but a conceptual one. Until then, almost every game told you, the player, what to do. There were rules and you had to follow them, punching buttons like a lab rat. Elite jettisoned the rule book into space and let you get on with absolutely anything. It was the first, what we would call a sandbox game, or an open world game. You can play the game in any way you want, it's not linear any more. Suddenly you are given a playing environment and you can choose to do Mission A first or Mission D first. You can also choose not to do any missions, you can just go out there and explore if you want to. Suddenly you could really control your entertainment experience in ways that were never possible before. The fantasy of exploring a limitless galaxy is a seductive one, hence the success of memorable exercises in wish fulfilment like the camp but lovable Star Trek, or the rambling, picaresque shenanigans of space-hopping hobo Doctor Who. Those interstellar bumbags had all the fun. Now, thanks to Elite, you could explore the universe like Kirk or the Doctor. But unlike them, you didn't have a deep space travel card, no. You had to pay your way by trading goods. And the quickest way to earn big money was to trade illegal stuff, like slaves or narcotics. Just like Doctor Who doesn't. Massive bastards could even turn to piracy, blowing up other ships and stealing their cargo. I had always seen Elite as... Imagine the 17th, 18th, 19th century of sailing ships going across the Atlantic, trading all sorts of goods. You know, should you just cover the normal things, or should you cover the things that were deeply illegal? We wanted the player to have the freedom to do good and to do bad. It was, like, kind of Thatcher in space. It was make money in this universe, however you want to do it. If you want to sell slaves, if you want to sell narcotics, if that's the way to do it, even though there was risk involved, that's what you did. If you can imagine in the mid-1980s, we were at the height of capitalism and the economics of life and the politics of life as well, were reflected inside the game. It wasn't overtly meant to be political at all, but I think it sort of, as a sort of child of its time, it sort of became that way because of the money focus of the game. You found yourself playing the game because you wanted that docking computer, you wanted that large cargo bay or whatever. And you aspired to the next bit of money and you would do anything in the game to just try and get that little extra bit because you wanted it so much. There are so many new concepts in that game, it was such a leap forward that I think for publishers and for the audience at the time, it took a while to get their head around it. But once they understood what was possible, that you could create worlds inside a computer, that was just absolutely amazing. Elite gave birth to an entire genre of open world sandbox games, in which the player is largely free to create their own narrative. The most famous example being the gleefully anarchic and morally wonky Grand Theft Auto, which we'll return to later. So, Britain had enjoyed a mini renaissance of early gaming, but the rest of the world wasn't just sitting around, giving up and going, "Pffff..." Thousands of miles away, somewhere terrifyingly foreign, a boffin was working on a game so nightmarishly addictive, it would soon enslave all of mankind and destroy the world as we knew it. Kind of. You'll have to watch the next part to see if I've oversold that. # Try not to use me # Try not to use me... # The year is 1985 and as an audience of millions pretends to live in harmony while withstanding this fucking excruciating Duran Duran performance at Live Aid, the world is in flux. Riots are tearing across the United Kingdom and not even the glittering Royal Premiere of Back To The Future can stem that chaos, chiefly because the two events are entirely unrelated. Meanwhile, something was about to happen in the world of gaming that was on a par with the Beatles releasing their first single but with catchier music. When Mario first appeared as the protagonist in the challenging Donkey Kong, he was known only as Jumpman. A few years later he popped up in the somewhat bare-boned platformer Mario Bros but it wasn't until 1985 and the release of Super Mario Bros that he became an instantly recognisable icon. Super Mario Bros is a side scrolling platform game where basically you have to run from left to right, going up ladders, down pipes, jumping on monsters, collecting gold coins. He's just a masterpiece of minimalist design. You get his personality from just this tiny, tiny bit of information. His design actually came from the limitations of the console at the time, you know, the blue overalls, the red cap, the moustache, all of which came about because they couldn't really render anything more complex than that. So it was red, white, blue and black for a moustache, it was as simple as that, and it was born of necessity. That's why it's curious that he's become the kind of iconic brand character that he is now. Mario just means games to me, if I'm being honest. Always friendly, always beautiful to play, like ALWAYS beautiful to play. It has never really failed and I think that Mario represents all the right stuff in gaming, all that pure fun stuff, the essence is all there in Mario. Again, it's this idea of complexity hidden behind simplicity so the Super Mario games look simple, they look beautiful, they look like they're for everybody and they are, but they're also really, really difficult games, you know? 'Oh, you idiot!' It is the hallmark of just how well judged Mario's level of difficulty is - in the process of playing it you'll die hundreds, if not thousands of times, but each time, you'll blame yourself, not the game. And it's that constant sense that next time you can do better that spurs you on and keeps you playing. Argh! In fact, the Mario platforming format is so compelling it appeals to absolutely everyone from the under fives to the under fatwas. I've become a master of the Nintendo machine. I think I've become very good at defeating all sorts of tiny little two-dimensional enemies. Yes, Salman Rushdie became a Mario addict during his virtual house arrest. He even put his addiction to good use with his children's novel, Luka And The Fire Of Life, seemingly directly inspired by the game. In this, the hero traverses levels, saves his progress and has multiple lives, which probably seems like a particularly brilliant concept when you're living under a death sentence. You can't really talk about Super Mario's success without talking about Koji Kondo's music design. Mario's music was brilliant because every melody is memorable. There were so many of them. And that's the sickest one, I think. I swear, any rapper would just be like, that's the best rap beat ever. 'Labrinth, come in.' I think video games have influenced my whole reason for wanting to make the music I make. You know, that kind of 8-bit energy, 16-bit energy. It's kind of inspired a lot, especially a lot of the earlier stuff I made with Tinie massively. It just had a very important effect on the way I think about music and see music and get inspired with music as well. Mario was created by Shigeru Miyamoto, seen here winning a BAFTA in celebratory scenes. No other game designer has ever been able to replicate the sheer joy of exploration and childhood wonder like Shigeru Miyamoto. People talk about Miyamoto as the Spielberg of game design. He very much is. He's a man who creates wonder on the screen like no-one else. In fact, Miyamoto isn't just the Spielberg but the Walt Disney of games, responsible for an unprecedented number of treats including the beautifully designed and widely beloved Zelda series. Unlike many video game mascots, which tend to be a Crash Bandicoot in the pan, Miyamoto's creations have endured largely because the games they appear in tend to be very well made. Mario, in particular, has become almost a kitemark of quality. If you've grown-up with Mario, then he's part of your life and so there are now parents who want their children to experience Super Mario and have the excitement and joy of problem solving and winning games that they did with the Mario characters. It's a joy to watch my children enjoying it. Back on Earth in 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, marking the end of the Cold War and the eastern bloc. And these weren't the only tumbling blocks and falling bricks the Soviets had to contend with. I think there's been puzzles throughout the ages and I think Tetris is the perfect incarnation of a traditional puzzle game in video game form. Everybody is familiar with putting puzzle pieces together and it just combined that with reflexes and that's kind of like the perfect melding of two worlds, like sports and puzzles. When video games started out they were things anyone could play, like Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, things literally anybody could understand. Tetris is just like that. Games have got more complicated but Tetris was "fit shapes together". The minute you learn how to play Tetris you've already succeeded at it and there's not many games you can say that about. The minute you learn, "Oh, this block goes in here, "this fits in here, then that fits in here, that goes boom," and you've already succeeded right away. The minute you learn it, you're winning at it. I think that's the magic of Tetris, that's what makes it completely compelling right from the start. It's just a design that's so perfect that every single game designer who looks at that thinks, "I really wish I could've made that." It's so simple but so beautiful. Tetris's straightforward design was largely a result of the way it was created. Computer engineer Alexey Pajitnov wrote it on the defiantly non-gamesy, Soviet and utilitarian Electronica 60 terminal. It was pretty much at the dying embers of the Cold War. It was one of the first products that moved from east to west and, interestingly, he never actually made any money out of it until very, very recently because it was effectively owned by the Russian government. Tetris was perhaps the first game that was compelling to the point of being addictive. While playing, you were dimly aware that some kind of irrational appeal had completely gripped your mind. It was like a sickness, absolutely like a sickness, because it was a constant, "Can I do this? I can do it, I've won. "Can I do this? I've won. I've won. I've won. I've won. I've won." Panic, panic, panic, and then eventually, you would lose, but there was always, success was always just a couple of button presses away, it was always a couple of button presses away so it was just a constant reward. There's a concept called flow in video game playing and in fact it happens outside of video game play as well. It's where a person will be completely immersed and engaged in the task at hand and everything else just disappears and falls to the wayside. Years ago, the repetitive nature of knitting was quite often used to help people with low-level mental health issues, low-level depression, and Tetris is a similar kind of environment to that. If you handed me Tetris right now I would play for an hour happily. Tetris, for me, was a hugely significant game because it was the first game I ever got on my Game Boy, which was basically your conduit to life and entertainment as a child. Bundling Tetris with every Game Boy was a masterstroke. Here was an addiction you could carry around with you for a cheeky hit now and then, just like cigarettes but a bit less deathy. I dread to think how many bus stops and train stops were missed because of it but it was that sort of thing, you could just take it out of your pocket and play it whenever you had any moment of downtime. And that's something we're still seeing today with mobile phones. Its lineage leads to things like Angry Birds - the whole kind of casual mobile scene pretty much had its ancestry in the likes of Tetris. Even as the Russians were chalking up their first big hit with Tetris, meanwhile on our side of the Iron Curtain, Hollywood was starting to get seriously involved in the games industry. Games were being created by the people who brought you Star Wars. You know, Star Wars. What was interesting straightaway about the LucasArts studio was it was under the umbrella of Lucasfilm, George Lucas's company, so it was the first connection between film and games. LucasArts started and it had a mandate to stay small and not lose any money and to be the best, I think, were the three slogans they had. And also, don't use Star Wars. George wanted this new company to stand on its own legs. Early LucasArts efforts were action games which, while technically cutting-edge, didn't have much impact. What these games were missing was a coherent story, something you'd think Hollywood would excel at. The first attempts at computerised interactive fiction such as Zork, here, consisted of nothing but text on a screen - a kind of playable novella you navigated through by typing in instructions like "go north" and "get lamp". This spectrum adaptation of The Hobbit added crude graphics to the sea of text - not quite Peter Jackson. It wasn't until LucasArts turned the genre into a point and click cartoon that interactive storytelling came of age. When anyone asks me what my favourite video game is, it's not your Grand Theft Autos or Call Of Dutys, it's Monkey Island. The Secret Of Monkey Island was a brilliantly realised comic adventure overflowing with character and charm. What I loved about the Monkey Island series was the fact that they were a bit romantic at times, the main character, the protagonist, was a guy was a guy by the name of Guybrush Threepwood, a wannabe pirate who just really didn't have it in him. He didn't have the guts, he didn't have the nous to become this famous pirate that he'd always wanted to be. We had Elaine Marley, the love interest. She was funny, the script was excellent. The main antagonist, the main baddie, was a ghost pirate by the name of LeChuck. I love that character so much, I've actually got a tattoo on my leg of the man himself. Not only is it a beautifully programmed game and wonderful looking - really lovely visuals, really distinctive, but at the same time it also had a very strong character sense of humour about it. You know, a tone, basically, in the way that a good movie has a tone. So few games are genuinely funny and this game was not only funny in its writing, It used its mechanics to set up a lot of the comedy. There's a sword fight in Monkey Island that you have to win but the way you win it is not by being better with a sword but by having the funnier comebacks. They are basically insult sword fights. The character you're fighting against will insult you in some way and then you've got various choices of what's the funniest retort, what's the funniest comeback. As you win the argument, as you win the fight of witty rejoinders, the fight would go in the same direction. I mean, we were certainly influenced on Monkey Island by The Simpsons but also, I think, Monty Python in a way. What the Holy Grail was doing to the Arthurian legend we were hoping to do to pirates. Fittingly, for a game forged from many different influences, some believe Monkey Island turned out to be quite influential itself, pointing out similarities between the game and the vastly entertaining Pirates Of The Caribbean movies. Both the game and the film feature a reluctant swashbuckler who attempts to rescue his wisecracking love interest from a motley crew of zombie pirates with a scary undead leader. There are even individual moments that seem vaguely familiar. For instance, here, Guybrush Threepwood solves a problem by using a coffin as a boat, a bit like Jack Sparrow did in Dead Man's Chest. Sorry, mate. Mind if we make a little side trip? I didn't think so. All of which, I'm sure, is a total coincidence. It's hard for me to watch those movies and not see little glimpses of Monkey Island in them, but Monkey Island was based on the Pirates Of The Caribbean ride. That was my whole influence for that game, so it's kind of a full circle thing. Monkey Island earns a place on our list for bringing cinematic storytelling techniques to interactive fiction and its spirit lives on in advanced contemporary games like the grim murder mystery, LA Noire, and this year's flawed but interesting Beyond Two Souls. They're impressive, but a bit po-faced. Nothing since has had the humour of Monkey Island. All this stuff about spinning yarns was all well and good but when would games learn to focus on the really important things like teaching children how to maim and kill? The answer, fortunately, was soon. Bang! The early '90s were brimming with firsts - the first President Bush was gleefully waging the first Gulf War. The first McDonald's opened in Russia! And something called the World Wide Web became publicly accessible for the first time. Popular youth culture, meanwhile, was entranced by slackerdom and the grunge scene, as detailed on gaudy entertainment shows like The Word. But there was also a new wave of cultural icons, hailing from Japan, whose specialist subject on Mastermind would've been kicking the shit out of each other. Street Fighter II looks incredible. It's the game that made gaming cool. Arcades had to draft in more machines just to accommodate for the demand for it, you know, it was just such a... such a huge, huge phenomenon. Street Fighter II is a prime example of why games are good, cos you've got a friend and you say, "Let's just have a reasonable game of Street Fighter." "Yeah, sure, let's have a game of Street Fighter." And you end up screaming at them, "I'm going to kill you! I'm going to kill you!" But it was great, cos it was competitive and it was so unlike anything that I'd ever played before, to be honest, cos it's just two characters punching each other in the face. It was definitely competitive, especially when you play with bad winners. I called them bad winners, because, while they're knocking you the hell out, they're just like, "Yeah! Bam! Take that!" And you just... You're just getting totally trashed up! You lose! There have always been head-to-head games - Pong was a head-to-head game - but they tended to be simple test of reflexes, until Street Fighter II came along. This too was a test of reflexes, but also, crucially, a test of memory, agility and strategy. Now, unless you know what's going on, it looks fairly mindless, but it's actually far more complex than it appears. I think the key thing about Street Fighter II was that it popularised the idea of complexity in control systems. It was one of the first games to introduce the idea of special moves, so each of the colourful characters have their own way of fighting. To perform, say, Ryu's Rising Dragon Fist, your fingers have to perform quite a complex dance on the controllers. You have to memorise then perform this move at lightning speed, which makes it a bit like mastering a musical instrument. Someone playing Street Fighter II is making hundreds of strategic decisions at lightning speed. It's basically scissors, paper, stone, but on a bewilderingly complex scale. People playing Street Fighter II now, they're still really competitive, and they're doing frame-by-frame analysis of where the vulnerable windows are, and when you can use which attack, and what blocks what and what doesn't block what and it's, um, it's just crazy. That's why it's so satisfying when you win. You aren't simply thumping someone in the face. You're outwitting and outperforming them, while thumping them in the face. Street Fighter II influenced a whole raft of other "beat 'em ups" of growing complexity, such as the phenomenal Tekken series, which, as you can see, became increasingly more violent. Still, at least no-one's ever inspired to actually do that kind of thing in real life, as a consequence of playing the game. I remember, when I was a kid, my brothers, um, made me fight with another kid and it was just like a little kind of spar with another young kid that was my age. Everybody thought I was going to lose and, um... I actually used Tekken moves to win! It was so dumb, but I actually won! With my dodgy little Eddy Gordo moves. My missus still laughs at me about that, like, I remember my brother saying it around the table and I was like, "Oh, shit, I actually did it!" That's how much I was into Tekken! It's so wrong! Oh, well, at least they're just kicking and punching each other. It's not like games are full of people running around shooting guns! By 1993, there have been a few games in which you shoot people with guns from a first-person perspective, like the fun Nazi-culling excursion Wolfenstein 3D, but it was the release of our next game that truly cemented their place in history. Doom was a flabbergasting, ultraviolent descent into bloody hell! The first time I saw Doom, my jaw was on the floor, it was absolutely stunning! Doom was one of the big "holy shit" moments in games history. I remember, I had been working at PC Gamer for about a year when that had come out and, you know, we were experienced video game people. You know, we all did that for a living. And Doom was one of those moments where, the first time we saw it, we were like, "What is this?" The modern-day shooter is Doom, essentially. Id Design effectively created the first-person shooter, with Wolfenstein, before Doom. Doom popularised it, because it was the perfect implementation, I think, at that time of the idea of seeing, of you inhabiting the character, and the camera view being your view of the world. In fact, this ground-breaking first-person viewpoint was actually a happy accident. The reason why we made the games first-person when we started was because it took less processor time to actually not draw a character in front of you, so the game can go faster because of it. There was something very, um... How can I describe it? ..lonely.. ..about Doom. I know, it's not a shock for some people to imagine computer players, computer game players as being lonely, but Doom was one of those games I used to dream about, you know. There was a feeling of real isolation to it, you know, and, er, I found that quite powerful at times. Isolation is scary. Doom was scary. Very scary! Honestly! Young people hearing older people talk about... how Doom was scary must be like, you know when you read those stories how when people saw the first cinema and would see a train coming, and they would run out of the cinema, you know what I mean, you hear those stories and laugh and think, "These idiots! "They thought it was a real train coming!" But you know, things can have an incredible effect on you, when you're first experiencing them. The reason why Doom was terrifying for me was because there were doors in it that could open and shut. That, you know, seems like caveman staff, like being scared of that, like, "Eugh!" being scared of a shadow or something, but the fact that there were doors, and you could hear things behind the doors, that was an incredible kind of leap forward, that was an incredible, um, an incredible thing! One of the things that makes Doom scary is just, obviously, the darkness in the game and it's also scary in that, um, enemies, you can hear them wandering around, so you know they're there somewhere and just hearing that, not seeing it, is a scary thing. And also, you know that you could go through a hallway and accidentally step on the wrong thing and, all of a sudden, a wall opens up next to you and stuff is coming out at you. Doom was packed with so many innovations, it was almost embarrassing, but its biggest innovation of all was the immersive and compelling multiplayer mode. I can remember, I was actually working at a game development studio, and one day we all went in one Saturday, we all went in and set up the computers, um, set up the local area networks, that we could all play Doom together, and it was my first experience of being in a game world with a whole bunch of friends playing together, beating enemies, er... and being aware of each other, that whole idea of telepresence, being aware of each other in a game world, it was fascinating and so, so compelling and we just played for 12 hours straight. The beauty of video games is that it, um, it adds... it adds a dimension to friendship that nothing else does. Going to see a film with your friends is nothing compared to being in a shoot 'em up or a game with your friends and Doom was the first game that really allowed us to experience that. Yeah, although it's hard not to notice that experience is kind of violent and, in this regard, Doom was a child of its time. By 1993, technology had improved to the point where in-game characters could be represented, albeit crudely, by real people, as in the notorious Mortal Kombat here, And the sight of these "real" people maiming and mutilating each other was a step too far, for some. When a player wins, the so-called "death sequence" begins. The game narrator instructs the player "to finish...", and I quote, "finish his opponent." The player may then choose a method of murder, ranging from ripping a heart out, to pulling off the head of the opponent with spinal-cord attached. Every generation seems to have some sort of cultural moral panic, whether it's, you know, Elvis Presley's hips or video nasties or whatever, then, in the '90s, it was video games. It was games like Doom, you know, and Mortal Kombat, that had what were perceived to be super gory terrible graphics which, when you look at them now, is ludicrous, cos, of course, it's just basically like people made out of Ceefax getting blown up. Just as controversial was the frankly crappy Night Trap, which came on the exciting new CD-ROM format, threatening to turn games into full-motion video nasties. Five teenage girls have disappeared, after spending the night at the old Lakeshore winery house of Mr and Mrs Victor Martin. It's like a television programme in a lot of ways and the purpose is you're part of a crack team that's protecting some girls on a slumber party. So the gameplay is, basically, clicking on the CCTV cameras and setting traps for these kind of vampire things that are coming in. And, because it's video and not graphics, and especially at the time I think, it was life-like, because it wasn't the clunky graphics of the '80s, - this was film you are watching. - What are you doing?! And it is quite disturbing to watch it, actually, because it does feel very voyeuristic. I understand why it was controversial, um, because even today, if you made a game today where the concept was spying on, you know, college girls in their lingerie, via various security cameras, and kind of stalking them around this house, that would be very controversial now! Back then, I can understand why people had the reaction that they did. It has been... quite a leap from Pac-Man to Night Trap. Night Trap, which, just to be clear, was a deeply shit game, was such a hot potato, it featured heavily in a US Senate hearing on video game violence, which led to Toys "R" Us taking it off the shelves. Mortal Kombat and Night Trap are not the kind of gifts that responsible parents give. Night Trap, which adds a new dimension of violence, specifically targeted against women, is especially repugnant. Significantly, it led to the creation of the US video game ratings system, a voluntary code designed to alert parents to content that might be unsuitable for their disgusting children! This had a twofold effect. On the one hand, the games industry was aware it was being watched. But on the other hand, the introduction of ratings meant that games could now be conceived and marketed explicitly as not for children. Suddenly, developers had a green light to pursue nasty games for nasty adults, leading to further controversy, with the death-packed pedestrian-splattering Carmageddon being briefly banned in the UK in 1997 and the MP-alarming Grand Theft Auto making its debut that same year. Lots of people at that time, moral campaigners were trying to link video game violence with real-life violence and we saw this later on with, um, the Columbine tragedy, which lots of people tried to suggest that the two kids that were involved in this were heavy games players. Every time there's any sort of violent act in the news, it's always reported like, "And the shooter was a big fan of," you know, "Grand Theft Auto or Call Of Duty." It's like, well, that's because he's an 18-35-year-old man. That's probably why he's a fan, not because he's a psychopath! Recently, in the USA, the National Rifle Association has tried to shift blame for a spate of mass shootings away from the availability of firearms and onto the shoulders of video games. Through vicious, violent video games, with names like Bulletstorm... Grand Theft Auto, Mortal Kombat, and Splatterhouse! Ironically, the NRA make some crude target shooting and varmint hunting games of their own. Furthermore, not everyone is convinced of a link between violent games and violent behaviour. I think there might be violent people that play these video games, but I don't think these video games turn you into violent people. We should move on. We should talk about some of the positive aspects of video games or some of the genuine challenges we can make to the industry, like where are the positive, er, female role models in games? But you know, if we carry on with this debate... It amazes me that it's lasted me for so long. Dedicated gamers tend to reflexively scoff at any suggestion games might be too violent, but it's clear that even the most hard-core splatter movies don't dwell on biological destruction to quite the same gleeful degree as many games do. Increasing graphical fidelity means the debate will intensify, as the portrayal of violence does. It's easy to laugh at the low-tech depiction of death in the early Mortal Kombat games, but the recent Mortal Kombat 9 features extreme and upsetting imagery that would be almost entirely unthinkable in most other mediums. Despite scenes that shocking, Mortal Kombat 9 failed to generate any real controversy, but then, many games still fly somehow under the cultural radar and, consequently, aren't called upon to justify themselves. I'm traditionally quite nonchalant about violence in video games. I played the shit out of things like Doom and Sniper Elite, but even I find that basically unacceptable, which either means I've become a terrible wuss in my old age or games are becoming so forensically graphic, they're reaching a tipping point. Some games have a more mature and responsible attitude to depicting violence than others. Some are outright irresponsible. Others, I think, do it in a much more mature and responsible way. And so, um, I don't think there's anything inherently bad about expressing or exploring the subjects of violence in video games, just as there is in any medium, but there is violence in the real world, there will be violence in any artistic, er, reflection of the real world, and video games are no different. And when women in games aren't being gruesomely sawn in half, they're often being simplified, patronised and objectified. But the games industry's treatment of what I tactfully won't refer to as "the titted gender" was about to be challenged, as we'll see after this break. Picture the scene. It's the mid-1990s and no-one knows what to make of humankind's poxy existence any more because OJ Simpson has just left court an entirely innocent man. Barings Bank has collapsed thanks to rogue trader Nick Leeson and in the world of pop, middle-class Kinks fans Blur are going head to head with dirge-spewing musical chimps' tea-party Oasis in a battle literally no-one gave a shit about, even at the time. Meanwhile, bruised by the beating it took over flogging violent games to kids, the games industry suddenly hit on a new target market. People off their faces on ecstasy, or clubbers as they are technically known. Have you seen any drug-taking? Aye! Did you take any yourself? Here we have a normal, healthy young man and here we have a fellow who has been experimenting with PlayStation for only a few minutes. Enter the slickly marketed PlayStation, positioned as the post-club, post-spliff entertainment medium of choice, bristling with trippy visuals and incredible soundtracks. PlayStation moved gaming on and gaming was now something that young adults did, not just men. Lots of woman played Wipeout, lots of women played early PlayStation games. They understood there was something powerful about putting a woman on screen. Tomb Raider was the first game I became obsessed with. It was the only game at the time where there was a woman involved, and a woman with a couple of guns shooting stuff and being really kick ass. Partly inspired by the gutsy female image of singer Neneh Cherry and post-punk toon feminist Tank Girl, Tomb Raider's Lara Croft earns a place on our list for being gaming's first true female icon. This was the era of Loaded and FHM, and Lara Croft somehow was the virtual representation of that whole idea, she was a sexy Mario, the sexy sonic. There has been so much discussion about was she an object of female empowerment or an object of male titillation? When I was ten years old playing that game, that didn't matter to me, all I saw was a woman where previously I had only seen a man, and that was huge for me. Having ruled the late '90s, brightening up trendy magazine covers and appearing in irreverent soft drinks ads, the 2000s would be less kind to Lara, despite, or perhaps because of, being trained by the equally unrealistic Angelina Jolie in a pair of noisy but not very good Hollywood action flicks. Stop! But then in 2013, Tomb Raider was rebooted and re-imagined with an increased emphasis on story and Lara's character. I have finally set out to make my mark. To find adventure. Another key difference - this time the lead writer was female. I didn't like the way she had been adopted by the wider media and over-sexualised, and I felt that as a younger female gamer I was being pushed away from the franchise. When I took on the role of helping develop this new, younger Lara, I really thought about what myself as a gamer when I started out would have liked and what the younger me would have responded well to. You can look at the journey of video games and mirror it with the journey of Lara Croft as a character. At the beginning she was a look, because video games were mostly about looks, and then as time has gone on, Lara's creators have made her more of a character, more of a relatable person. Similarly, all video games have been trying to tell stories that are more human, more relatable. The new Tomb Raider reboot feeds into that. What you have there is a character who was once an avatar and is now becoming a person. This shift reflected a debate about gaming's depiction of women that was already well underway. In many ways, games still seem psychologically lodged somewhere around 1978, full of eye candy dolly birds without much to say for themselves and the voices questioning this have been growing louder. In 2012, when cultural critic Anita Sarkeesian launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a series of short films about female stereotypes in games, some male gamers reacted by bombarding her with rape and death threats. I don't believe video gamers are sexist. I don't believe most games are sexist. But also, you look at video games and you can't deny that there are things in there that are not flattering to women and make you roll your eyes and sigh, or sometimes make you really angry. I think it is not so much gaming culture that is unfriendly to women, it is internet culture. Even today, a huge number of games still place you, the player, in the shoes of a boring cookie-cutter Caucasian hetero dude with a dick and a gun, and fuck all else of interest. But there are some exceptions. Mass Effect is a good example of a mainstream video game, one that many people buy, that does include something other than straight white men and for that reason it has a very devoted following among people who are not necessarily straight white men. In Mass Effect, your character is basically bisexual by default, you can fight with whoever you want and pursue a relationship with whoever you want and it is sad that this is progressive but in a video game of this size it is progressive. I did not know you were such an optimist. You have that effect on people. Meanwhile, back in the late 1990s, those cool adult gamers were not content to experiment with things like female protagonists such as Lara Croft, they wanted whole new kinds of experience. Games had become set in their ways, there were too many predictable platformers or metronomic fighting games or by-the-book shoot-'em-ups. What was required was an entirely new kind of experiences, a new kind of game. And that is precisely what turned up. Winning a bobble head. PaRappa The Rapper is a game about a musical dog who learns the value of self belief by rapping with a kung-fu onion while you just press buttons along with the beat. PaRappa The Rapper was incredible. Such a simple, really clever use of the controller, you had to hit the things in sequence. The first time I remember the "boom-boom-ba, boom-boom-ba". That very simple Simon says kind of gameplay. Simon sets the pace, you follow right along. Simon says style rhythm action games began with the endearingly advertised computer smart arse Simon. Simon has a brain, you either do what Simon says or else go down the drain. PaRappa turned this basic concept into a psychedelic musical pop-up book. The songs are... they are so catchy and insane. I often listen to the onion man song. The driving school one. There's the one where they are all waiting to go to the toilet. There's the driving school one, did I say that? Yes. PaRappa The Rapper was appealing because it made people like me who have absolutely no musical ability whatsoever feel like they did. That was a big part of the appeal, the fact that you were pressing buttons in time. There's no musical talent in that whatsoever but you felt that there was. PaRappa The Rapper led to games like Guitar Hero, in which you use a simplified push-button guitar to play along to recognisable hits from big-name acts. Later games added far more realistic instruments, meaning players would generally improve their skills, however old they were, as you can see from this charming footage. The very latest rhythm games have taken this to the logical conclusion. You now connect a real guitar directly to your console. In fact, they are not marketed as games any more but bona fide musical education tools. Not a bad legacy for a cartoon dog in a hat, although PaRappa himself has been forgotten, relegated to appearing alongside 50 Cent as a pop culture reference in subversive comedy shows. # Kickin' and punchin' and blockin' # Blockin' and kickin' all night # Blockin' and kickin' and turn around # We'll be punching everything in sight. # PaRappa, you never return my phone calls so now eat bullets, and lick my balls. It is a rarity talking about games on TV. TV doesn't often "do" games and one of the key reasons for that is that TV commissioners believe that no-one wants to watch other people playing them, which is a valid point. Picture two dweebs playing some baffling point-and-click strategy game, it is not like anyone is going to pack out a stadium to see that. This illuminating documentary footage depicts emotional South Korean fans watching their idols in action. Who are their idols? These guys. Shit-hot Starcraft players. The Koreans are quite into Starcraft. A densely complex war sim, Starcraft is basically fast-paced space chess. Starcraft is a real-time strategy game, building a base and sending soldiers to kill people but at a pace that will take whole years off your life. Starcraft is interesting in that it has emerged as the first sort of competitive sport of gaming. If you look at Korea, for example, Starcraft is effectively the national sport. There are cable television channels dedicated to Starcraft. The key Starcraft pro players in Korea are superstars, they have fans, screaming adulation. As you can see it evokes unparalleled excitement among commentators. For a lot of people, they just enjoy watching people that are good at things. It is almost like watching a virtuoso piano playing. When you watch these guys playing Starcraft, their fingers are a blur, and it is kind of fascinating. Never mind fascinating, the Korean audience finds the game shout-out-loud shit-ifying. Shortly afterwards, the year 2000 arrived in a flurry of optimistic fireworks and humankind wondered what majesty the new century would behold. It turned out the answer was a voyeuristic reality show in which egotists entertained the nation by sharing a bog for six weeks. They weren't the only housemates entrancing millions. The Sims in some sense is a life simulator where you create little people, personalities, they then live their lives in the game. You can create houses for them, they can get jobs, fall in love, have kids. Following in the footsteps of the voyeuristic satire The Truman Show, in which the world tuned in to watch the mundanity of a suburban life, The Sims tapped into our desire for a perfect domestic existence. It appeals to that part of you that wants to escape into another world and create another version of yourself, almost too similar to what your real life is. I was living on my own when I first played The Sims and I didn't really go for it. I just could not see the point. But I was playing it and it was in the early stages of the game when you buy a flat and I noticed there were these little green patches on the floor and the sound of flies near them. I was like, "What are these?" As the game progressed, more of these would build up. I thought, "How do I get rid of them?" I figured it out that it was wastepaper bins. You put wastepaper bins in each room and those little green things stop appearing. I was playing the game and I thought, "Maybe I should put wastepaper bins in my flat." The Sims wasn't just idle play, it was stressful. You have to micro-manage every aspect of your Sims' existence, from how many bins they had, to how often they went to the toilet. You had to eat healthily, exercise loads and generally behave if you wanted a good life and that good life was rigidly defined as a well-paid job, a smiling partner and a tidy house full of possessions. Maintaining all of that became increasingly difficult. It took the American suburban dream and turned it into an endless point-and-click pain in the arse. It was meant to be a satire of US culture and most people didn't get that. The promise of the game is that you have all of these objects and each one has little ratings. Each object becomes a ticking time bomb. They can break, they can catch fire, become dysfunctional. You find out these objects you are buying to make yourself happy are making you miserable. Even though The Sims' roots lay in satirising consumerism, it soon became a capitalist cash cow itself, with a barrage of distinctly un-ironic branded spin-off packs you had to pay for. I don't think The Sims will ever be as popular again as it was when it was first released and the reason why is because we are The Sims now, really. Each other are The Sims. When you look at social networks and Facebook, you now have that top-down view into people's lives. The Sims created a realistic world but made you conform in it. Luckily a game was about to come along that would let you indulge your darker side. On September 11 2001, millions feared the world was about to slide into chaos. Weeks later a video game consisting almost entirely of nihilistic urban anarchy ushered in a new age of morally blank freedom for gamers. I love the feeling of dropping in to what is a pretty realistic simulation of a working city and then just causing havoc. It is just sort of perfect escapism for me. Early incarnations of Grand Theft Auto were somewhat primitive and looked vaguely reminiscent of the rebellious bedroom-coded ZX Spectrum games that were part of its genetic code. Despite being set in an exaggerated version of the USA, it was a defiantly British game made in Scotland from murders! Grand Theft Auto arrived at DMA Design, a small Scottish development team in Dundee. It was something their very small team had worked on for four years and it was thought of in the studio as kind of the runt of the litter. Then in came Sam and Dan Houser who took on a publishing deal with DMA Design. They became kind of the producers of the game and it changed. So when Grand Theft Auto III came out, they used 3D visuals which made the game feel more mature but it was also much more aware of wider cultural issues. It had lots of cool music in it and again there was a sense of anarchy to it but it was more out of control this time. I'm only pretending to play that. Grand Theft Auto III was an immense blockbuster revolutionising a franchise that has become one of the most lucrative entertainment properties in history with an influence that stretches beyond the world of games. If you watch the film Drive with Ryan Gosling. I do not believe that film would look the way it does if it wasn't for Grand Theft Auto. Lots of people say the director essentially made a non-interactive version of Grand Theft Auto. The world of Drive as depicted in that film is very much influenced and inspired by Grand Theft Auto, I think. But unlike cinema, most of the stories told within the world of GTA are ones the player effectively writes themselves using the freedom of their own actions. Don't be no wise-ass punk. Now give me that! The other day I stole a car, I'm shooting someone in the head and my wife was shouting shoot him again, shoot him again. Now, we are two very peaceable cat-loving ladies from Glasgow. I think I can rationalise it because I know it's not real, it's not real. Yes, and if rib-tickling viral videos are anything to go by, GTA's world of fantasy indulgence even seems to appeal to older players, especially those with an axe to grind against energy companies. You take that. Hello, what do you do for a living? Work for British Gas, do you? You wanker. I'll give you put my bills up. Bastard bank! You take that. You won't put them up no more. Bang! One for you and one for you! For some reason, this level of anarchic freedom seems to upset people. Parents, listen up because here's what you need to know tonight. In Grand Theft Auto, your son or your husband or your boyfriend or whoever can hire a prostitute, have sex with her and then beat her to death with a baseball bat. GTA is the gift that keeps on giving for tabloids. I mean, Parliament debates it, there are motions tabled in the House of Commons on it, there are endless commentators who judge it to be something linked to the devil. If you're a parent and you allow your son or daughter to watch this, even if they are beyond 18 years old, you're a lousy parent, in my opinion. It is the definitive moral panic game. Please don't make me ruin all the great work your plastic surgeons have been doing. Grand Theft Auto is pretty much the Frankie Boyle of the gaming world, really. It's controversial, Scottish, nihilistic, hard to defend in the Guardian and to what end? Well, because it just wants to make you laugh, of course. Yeah, shut it, pal. You'll leave here with an asshole like a yawning hippo's mouth. It is interesting being a Brit living in the United States. People outside of America tend to look at the American world from the outside a little more cynically. We look at American culture and American values with a little bit more cynicism than people inside America society do. You have to be on the outside to hold up a mirror and that may be the reason GTA has been fairly successful as a piece of satire. Again, I think the satire, the commentary in GTA, is often very crass. I think they miss the target as often as they hit it but again, the fact that they are trying goes beyond a lot of what a lot of triple-A big budget video games ever try to do. It's a giant cartoon, Grand Theft Auto, and it's not exactly a subtle representation of anything but then it is not meant to be. If you want a subtle representation of something else, read a lovely book by Jane Austen. Grand Theft Auto is all about causing mayhem and not giving a fig about the consequences but increasingly some games are prompting players to consider the repercussions of their actions. And they do it with surprising grace. Shadow Of The Colossus was a really fascinating game in a lot of ways. It was a really meditative game. You played a character who lived in a fantasy world, whose mission was to rescue a princess which is a very basic video game set-up. Your job in the game is to bring down these huge creatures. It's like seven huge boss battles where the bosses are not only monsters but so big that they are almost a landscape in themselves and gradually as the game goes on, your feelings as you bring down these monsters become more and more complicated. Because every time you killed one of these creatures, you realise you just killed something magnificent, something larger-than-life. This beautiful majestic animal and you just slaughtered it for some unknown reason. And every time you did one of those things your character design slowly morphed and became darker and darker and you realise you are the villain of this world. Shadow Of The Colossus was significant because it helped forge a new way of looking at games, one in which the player could no longer be certain they were the hero. It also influenced recent indie titles like Papers, Please which, despite its basic appearance, is a complex game that causes the player increasing discomfort. Papers, Please is a game where you are a customs officer working on a fictional border of a made-up country and you have to check everyone's paperwork to see whether or not they can come into the country. The mechanics is, like, someone approaches kind of the checkpoint and hands you their papers and they might ask you to let them in, they have family starving inside or they're trying to bring something to them but your job is just to check whether their paper is forged, do they have all their papers and whether to allow them to get in or reject them. You quickly realise you've got to be a bit evil. If you do not make the quota every day for stamping enough people through, you don't get enough money to feed your wife and kids. And it's the sort of game where you play it and you realise why people do bad things. It puts you into a position where you slide and you go, "All right, well, "just one person," and before you know it, you are completely corrupt. And yet you never really noticed it happening. Through those mechanics you feel a feeling that is so unique to gaming. You feel guilt. And a movie can't make you feel guilty, a book can't make you feel guilty but here's, like, I'm making an action and somebody can curse me because of it and I feel guilty and it's kind of brilliant in that way. Games excel at making you stand in other people's shoes. Not just the shoes of corrupt Eastern European officials but creatures so phantasmagorical, so beyond our imaginations they don't even need shoes. Imagine that. You can't! Something happened in the mid-2000s with the rise of what's called the massively multiplayer game and this was the point in which the line between games and reality started to get quite blurred. My wife got super into it and so did my son and what was nice in actual fact was it became quite a nice mother and son thing to do together. It was very interesting, you know, they would go on raids together. You know, where else can a woman, a grown woman who's mothered several children and written several hit movies, go out with her son, skin some animals, kill a troll, OK, win some gold and still see a lovely bit of scenery in a lovely new mythical city? Nowhere. The problem with a game this seductive is it can also be quite addictive. Regularly, I would play for 14 hours straight. When I would be raiding. I would do a couple of raids a day and then I'd have to do upkeep in between the raids. You hear of people who would sit there, especially men, I have to say, who will sit there with buckets or bottles attached to their nether regions so they don't have to move. They can play constantly and just pee in a bottle. The cliched image of World Of Warcraft players as addicted shut-in husks neglecting their own lives was memorably satirised in this South Park episode. Mum, bathroom! What, hon? Bathroom! Oh, that's a big boy, isn't he? Yeah, never mind World Of Warcraft, that is the tragedy of all games, isn't it? The way they steal you away from the real world where all the normal people live and encourage you to stay indoors. Gaming is just such a sad, sedentary pursuit, isn't it? It's totally unlike, say, the way you're sitting there in a darkened room passively watching me say this. Box sets are the silver bullet in this. Everyone who complains to you about playing Far Cry 3 for 30 hours has sat through far more of that in terms of Game Of Thrones and Breaking Bad, all of which is a pretty sedentary activity. And no-one is down on box sets. No-one is going, "These are appalling. "Box sets are making our children fat." So that's always been the one I've gone, "Slam! Have you watched a box set recently?" "Well, of course I have "because I have watched Dir Klurgen Furgen, the new Scandinavian murderer thing." How is that different to playing Grand Theft Auto V? Yes, you may learn a word or two of Danish as it goes along but it is exactly the same experience. In fact, it's more passive. At least my thumbs are getting a work-out. Never mind a work-out for your thumbs, what about your other fingers? Early video games were simple and so therefore anybody can sort of pick them up and figure out what to do. Then there were overlays upon overlays upon overlays of complexity to where, if you picked up a PS3 controller, it looked a little bit like the cockpit of a 747. The minute you went to a one-button gesture thing, it empowered a hole bunch of new gamers. That was really the power of it. It sounds too good to be true. Being able to play a game of tennis on your lunch hour and you don't even have to take your suit off. It was the first time you could actually play games with your family and have a level playing field. You know, you could hand the controller to your grandma, your mum, and say, "Let's play tennis," and they might well beat you at it. And for a long-time gamer that was a great experience. Wii Sports is on our list, not because it's one of the bestselling games of all time, shifting over 80 million copies, but because it's one of the most accessible, turning gaming into an even more mainstream pursuit that could be easily marketed at anyone who can do this or... this or... this. Right, this one is my favourite. Chop chop. I'll cook for you, Marv, if you want. After the spectacular coming of the Wii was the Microsoft Xbox Kinect which did away with the controller and instead watched you with its beady camera eye and judged your every action like Orwell's Big Brother but fun. The new incarnation of the Xbox comes bundled with this more advanced, bulkier version of the Kinect which can now analyse your heartbeat and facial expression. Gesture technology has now dribbled out of gaming and into other everyday gizmos like smartphones and even televisions which now routinely require you to wave at them like some kind of peasant, as we can see from this unsettling advert. And the gaming world hasn't finished invading your life just because it's taught you to perform a few gestures like some kind of gibbon. No, as we'll see, it's after nothing less than your soul. 2007 was grim. Even the launch of the spangly new iPhone couldn't distract anyone from the unrelenting misery of the global economic crisis. What could you do for cheap escapism? The cinema was full of crappy threequels and a new Transformers movie, so that was out. And thanks to the smoking ban, pubs now stank of sweat and arse gas. Fortunately, there was one form of entertainment that still delivered, and it chiefly delivered by letting you shoot people in the face. This action-packed epic is very much the Citizen Kane of remorseless gunfire. Modern Warfare's about putting you into the shoes of a soldier, putting you in the middle of a battle. And not just as the lone superhero, but as part of this giant machine. It's a world going on around you. The Call Of Duty franchise is impeccably produced and fun to play, but also, so brutal, many find it hard to stomach. For my money, the most disturbing mission in Modern Warfare is Death From Above. A mission that puts you in an AC130 gunship and puts a kind of grainy film over the camera, as you're looking down, shooting at targets you can't even recognise. It's the only mission in Modern Warfare that could be photorealistic because the real-life footage we see on the news from AC130s is grainy, and it's tremendously disturbing, because you can't make out what these figures are. It could be, it could almost be a statement, but it's not, it's just there so you can have fun, and that's very dark. Every Call Of Duty game seems to have its banner moment, which is almost deliberately conceived. Oh, this is the level that will get us all in the headlines in the Daily Mail and the Sun, and these are the things people will complain about. I think that's a little bit cynical. The game's success also lends the debate about violence an interesting new kink. Many of the guns it features are real-world weapons, licensed with the manufacturer's full consent. It's a kind of grim product placement which means the game doubles as a shop window for future gun owners, albeit inadvertently. The trouble is, some of its more fanatical fans are the very last people you'd want owning guns. Or even rocks, to be honest. Fucking come out of there, bitch! Go on! Get out! Fucking lightweight and marathon, you think you're fucking good, get the fuck! Call Of Duty is the prime example of a game with a horrible player base, in terms of behaviour online. Oh, my God! Get the fuck out, you stupid fucking dosshead! There's a joke that comedians tell called The Aristocrats, which is just basically just the most offensive joke you can possibly tell, and playing Call Of Duty with a headset on is like listening to a children's choir sing the longest, most vile Aristocrats joke, in your ear. For hours. It's intolerable. I swear to God, I'm going to come over there, I'm going to fuck your mom like the pig she is. All of that could lead you to believe that present-day gaming is horrible. Not necessarily. Video games are in an amazing place right now. Because you've got these giant blockbuster games that are like giant Hollywood movies and then you've also got the equivalent of the independent film scene. You've got games that are made by one person, two people, little teams who are saying something that they want to say. Just like indie films came about when the cost of making films was drastically reduced, now, tools and publishing options are available for essentially, the little guys, who just want to put their game out there, games that don't have so much appeal, but cost SO much less. They can recoup their investment with just a few thousand sales. Suddenly, it seemed the idiosyncratic bedroom coder of the 1980s was back with a vengeance, like someone had turned back the clock. And an unusual time-twisting indie platform game called Braid led the charge. Braid is a puzzle platformer, and it was created by Jonathan Blow. On the surface it's all about a guy trying to rescue a princess from a horrible monster. When you first pick it up, I'm just playing a platform game. But, then, going into kind of the fourth dimension, playing with concepts of time, and reversing and speeding up and manipulating time in a way that took something that looked familiar and completely reinvented it. One aesthetic thing I didn't like about it was, the main character. Just didn't care for the little guy. He looked like a sort of squashed Hugh Grant. HE LAUGHS You know, that's just my taste. I'm not a fan of miniaturised Hugh Grants. Braid is almost a game that's kind of too smart for its own good. Almost, I kind of feel that it's a game you admire. But I definitely remember reaching a point where I was like, I'm not really having fun any more. And that's fine, that's absolutely fine, because I think, for indie games, they have to explore what a game is. Braid earns a place on our list for proving indie games could sell, paving the way for other individual and experimental titles. Braid was swiftly followed then by Limbo, which, again, was a beautifully stylised, very emotionally wrenching story of a small boy walking through a kind of ethereal landscape. Journey is probably the most famous example of that. Fabulously beautiful. Incredibly emotionally involving. There's a point where the little fella just can't quite make it up a snowy mountain and Jesus, it'll get ya! Many of the new wave of indie titles hark back to the retro past, offering subversive or surprising reimaginings of gaming's heritage. And indie games aren't something you have to seek out in some obscure hobby shop. Today, you can buy them without leaving the comfort of your own hand. There's this whole line of video game genealogy that starts off with the arcades and moves through the Game Boy and stuff like Tetris and Mario and ends up with modern arcade-like mobile games like Candy Crush and Angry Birds. Games started off as something that everybody played. And now, again, they're something that everybody plays. Lots of people that didn't really think of themselves as gamers will play something like Angry Birds because it's like a time killer. Wherever you are, whatever you're doing, in a doctor's waiting room, on the bus, if you're bored on the Tube, you can play Angry Birds and it kills that dead time. With its intuitive, visually appealing gameplay, Angry Birds has brought intense hand-held pleasure to millions, just like your mum has. Angry Birds is a nice enough game. I don't think it's the best game in the world, but I mean, certainly, it deserves to be a success. Whether it deserves to absolutely rule the entire universe to the exception of everything else, I really don't know. Yesterday, when I was buying my train ticket to come down here, I looked over at the ticket clerk's phone that was lying next to the ticket window. Angry Birds. It's just everywhere. Like Pac-Man, way back yonder, Angry Birds has become an unstoppable kiddiewink merchandising phenomenon, with branded goods, cartoon shows, theme park rides and all. But Angry Birds isn't the only indie game to have built an empire. Our next game is, if anything, an even more impressive achievement. Minecraft is just one of those bits of gaming genius. I think you can sum up the appeal of Minecraft effectively by saying that it's Lego of video games. Minecraft is an open world game which lets players shape their environment by placing or destroying blocks. It's easy, it's creative and it's social. The beautiful thing with Minecraft is that you see people playing together to create something, to build some massive project. People coming together to build replicas of the Starship Enterprise, and stuff like that, within Minecraft, and that's a lovely thing, because most of the time in games, people come together to destroy stuff, and each other. Minecraft became a hit, selling over 33 million copies. And its most enthusiastic fans are children. Children can interact with Minecraft and it allows them to be creative in a way that nothing else does. Like, reading a book is great, it's wonderful, but it doesn't allow them to be part of that fantasy. Minecraft does. And they create these huge worlds for themselves, these huge structures, not because someone is telling them to, but because they want to. And they're probably learning so much about teamwork and design and architecture and the environment, just through playing this game. You get lots of teachers now, geography teachers use Minecraft to get children to design villages. You get physics teachers now using Minecraft to teach kids about simple mechanisms. And finally, I made it work. The Minecraft escalator. It really communicates to kids. My children, my sons play Minecraft a lot. My older son is on the autism spectrum. To him, Minecraft is so valuable, because it's a world of logic and creativity, which he immediately understands. This is the same for all children. Like, it's really helped my son, in a lot of ways, to kind of express himself, which is really profoundly important. I'd love to shake the maker of that game by the hand, because I think he's kind of changed my son's life. So, the world of games has become like the world of cinema, with multimillion dollar blockbusters to one side and low-budget, cerebral indie titles on the other. But now, there are signs of a third way emerging. We're seeing the beginnings of the gaming equivalent of the critically acclaimed HBO box set. Where did you get the money for this? Drugs. I sell hardcore drugs. Oh, good. Well, start helping out with the mortgage, then. Tsk! Yeah, you wish! Jimmy? Dad? I'm coming. Come here. Jimmy? Jimmy, stay back! Jimmy, I am warning you. Stop! The Last Of Us is the story of these two survivors in a world that has been ravaged by this pandemic. And we follow Joel, this middle-aged survivor, who's going to do anything it takes to survive, cross kind of any moral line and, through circumstances, he ends up teaming up with this 14-year-old teenager, girl, Ellie. I need a gun. No, you don't. Joel? I can handle myself. No! I think Ellie in The Last Of Us was a great female character. She's young, but she's very capable, but she's also got this interesting vulnerability and she's not grown up in our world. I've never been in a plane. Isn't that weird? And she can't really kind of understand it and she sort of brings a unique perspective because of that. She can't envisage a time when young teenage girls were just sort of obsessed with boys, and looking good. That's completely alien to her. Is this really all they had to worry about? Boys? Movies? Deciding which shirt goes with which skirt? It's bizarre. Like any self-respecting box set drama, the game gradually and inexorably moves towards a fulfilling, some might say devastating climax. For the first time in my life, I was crying, as I held a controller and moved a character around. I'm really glad my wife didn't come in, but I was just kind of going... Oh, my God. Game designers are getting older. Lots of the big game designers are in their 30s and 40s and they have children, and they suddenly are thinking about games in a different way. Not as systems, not as scoring mechanics, but as an emotional experience. Oh, baby girl. It's OK, it's OK. In the next five to ten years, we're going to see more games about emotions and about social situations, about politics and about society, because we are now living in an age where we understand what happens around us in a very interactive and very digital way. So here we are now in 2013 with games at a bit of a crossroads. From the monochrome simplicity of Pong, they've transformed via this series of technological and conceptual shockwaves to become the most varied form of entertainment since the written word. But one thing we've seen throughout this show is that gaming never stands still. And, sure enough, a new generation of hardware has just arrived, bringing with it a fresh set of capabilities which is going to overturn everything that went before. As their slick promo material makes clear, the new PlayStation 4 and Xbox One are both more powerful than their predecessors, but perhaps the biggest clue to gaming's future is their marked new emphasis on integrated social networking features. Now, why would games systems want to include social networking? Unless maybe social networking already functions like a game. Twitter is a massively multiplayer online game in which you choose an interesting avatar and then role-play a persona loosely based on your own, attempting to recruit followers by repeatedly pressing lettered buttons to form interesting sentences. The biggest way in which video games have affected our world, for me, is the increasing gameification of real life. Stuff like Twitter is a game. It's about small achievements adding up to bigger ones. And it's about playing the rules of whatever you're in. Gameification means applying the mechanics of video games to real-life. Now, often, this boils down to incentivising people to perform the same action over and over. Each time Mario headbutts a block, he gets a coin. When he gets 100 coins, he gets an extra life, and these perpetual little pats on the head compel you to bash those blocks for hours. By supplying a constant stream of fun-size rewards, social networking has, by accident, gameified whole aspects of our lives. Every second, another little gold coin for you to collect. More followers, more retweets, compelling you to interact over and over again. These are games we don't even realise we're playing. Every day, you have a drama and you have everyone sort of piling in to be the one to talk about, to be the one who gets retweeted. It has become kind of a game that I find myself gauging, when I do a tweet, how popular it's going to be and I try to guess ahead of time, like, how many retweets is that going to get, and how many favourites is that going to get. In terms of the competition, especially between, like, celebrities or people with the verification tick, every time I see someone, or every time someone's talking about someone, they're talking about, oh, I've got 50,000, I've got a million followers, I've got this. And it very much reminded me of a lot of games like that. It was always about how many points you got. It ups your profile and makes you feel like you're doing something in your life. What I do on Twitter a lot is just project a false persona. And it is like that avatar thing. It's like World of Warcraft or anything like that. The way I am on Twitter is nothing like the way I am in real life. That feels like a game, sometimes, you know what I mean? If you're a sociopath, feels like a game. So, how have video games changed the world? Well, they've entertained us, they've put us in the shoes of cartoon characters in fantastic settings, they've made spatial reasoning fun, they've allowed people to connect and explore nonexistent worlds, they've helped bridge the gap between Eastern and Western culture, they've provided a safe space to run riot, to fantasise out loud without anyone actually getting killed, they've handed a generation of creative thinkers a whole new set of tools to express themselves with, and they've inspired and instructed millions of children. Not that anyone cares about them! But, perhaps most significantly, possibly sinisterly, games have now burrowed, by stealth, into aspects of our social lives online and we, in response, have cheerfully invited them in, and that trend's just going to continue until whole areas of our existence have become games. In fact, you'll scarcely be known as you any more. You'll just be known as Player One. You might as well change your name by deed poll now and have done with it. That's the end of the programme now. I'd say game over, but only a prick would say that. Get out of my show.